Thoughts on MFJ's announcement

By now, you will have heard of the news that MFJ is ceasing manufacturing at it's Starkville, MS plant.
For the benefit of those few that have not....

Dear Fellow Hams and Friends,

It is with a sad heart as I write this letter.

As many of you have heard by now, MFJ is ceasing its on-site production in Starkville, Mississippi on May 17, 2024. This is also the same for our sister companies’ Ameritron, Hygain, Cushcraft, Mirage and Vectronics.

Times have changed since I started this business 52 years ago. Our product line grew and grew and prospered. Covid changed everything in businesses including ours. It was the hardest hit that we have ever had and we never fully recovered.

I turned 80 this year. I had never really considered retirement but life is so short and my time with my family is so precious.

I want to thank all of our employees who have helped build this company with me over the years. We have many employees who have made MFJ their career for 10, 20, 30, 40 and more years.

We are going to continue to sell MFJ products past May 17, 2024. We have a lot of stock on hand. We will continue to offer repair service work for out-of-warranty and in-warranty units for the foreseeable future.

Finally, a special thanks to all of our customers and our dealers who have made MFJ a worldwide name and a profitable business for so many years. You all are so much appreciated.

Sincerely Yours, 73s

Martin F. Jue, K5FLU

 

 

(As an aside.... I hear as of yesterday, that the spot MFJ had picked out at Dayton has already been filled by the Collins Radio Group that made such a fine showing for the last couple years. )

None of this should shock anyone who has been watching.  Martin was making subtle noises about retiring at Dayton last year in at least one of the podcasts from there.  He's 80 years old, after all.

The resulting discussions on the topic,  on some of the various Ham Radio forums were pretty evenly divided between those who will miss it and those who questions how they managed to get away with some of the QC issues they've been plagued with these last few years... some of the latter pretty gruesome. There have been several comments from apparently disgruntled employees of the place, complaining of a lack of tools, low morale, low pay and so on.

Without getting into those specifically, perhaps instead of talking about what Martin was supposedly doing wrong, perhaps we should be more concerned about why he's the only one left making amateur radio stuff on a large scale here in America.

What were the reasons that all the rest of them fell over, including the ones that Martin eventually propped up?

Assuming for the sake of discussion that the reports from the disgruntled former employees we have seen are true, is it possible that those conditions, those tactics,  are the reason that Martin was able to hang on for so much longer than the rest of them?

Mind, I will neither attack nor defend MFJ, or Martin himself. The point I'm making is that there is a discernible, repeatable course that helps keep businesses afloat when money and competition gets tight. With some businesses getting tight os more of a help than with others.

A parallel would be the American automotive industry the effects of who's cost cutting we've all seen over the last 30 or 40 years. Another would be the grocery industry. I am quite sure we can all point to our own favorite examples.

Like it or not, the instinct to help a business survive when money is tight is to be even tighter with money. The evidence would seem to suggest that MFJ was more successful at doing this than were their now-component predecessors (Cushcraft, HyGain, etc) along with a number of other companies that specifically ham operators depended on. Allied, Radio Shack, Heathkit, Lafayette, and so on. Take as evidence that MFJ lasted as long as it did, and (I believe) absent Martin's desire to retire, could have gone on for quite a while, yet.

Let me put this another way: Complain if you will about QC issues. You won't get much argument from me on the point. But I will suggest we've seen a lot of businesses go through similar struggles....  and I suggest that absent those cost cutting measures and the problems that ultimately resulted from those measures, MFJ would have gone belly up a long time ago.

Or, to China instead of being built here in the States... ast which point, I suppose we could all bitch louder about QC issues.

Could Martin have sold the place? Maybe, but I'm willing to bet he was asking more than a lot of  American companies were willing to pay.  (OK, it's speculation but I'm betting Martin wanted to keep the company here in the states instead of selling the whole thing to China.. It meshes with how hes kept the manufacturing here at home all these years. )

Was MFJ over-valued? Possibly. Let's face it, gang, Ham Radio is a pretty vertical market, and size limited. The population is both aging and shrinking. The figures we have on this are from the ARRL and I suspect them to be under-reported.   Outsiders less dedicated to the hobby than Martin has been over the last 50 or so years, will not see it as a solid investment. Sorry, they just won't.

So, while I'm sure that there will be some parts of the MFJ companies that will resurface, we won't see the like of MFJ, with so broad a line of Ham Radio products, again.

 If that's really the driving force here... less than laudatory projections of the hobby from a business annalist standpoint, who on Earth would want to be a part of that marketplace? That doesn't speak well for our future, does it?

OTOH,  How do you explain the continued presence of Yaaesu, Kenwood, etc? And yet, they are still here.

Well, come to think.... not here.... but THERE. And perhaps that's the elephant in the room, here. Those companies are not manufacturing here in the states, and therefore are not subject to the same pressures MFJ has been in terms of wages, taxes, CODB and so on. Can it be that like so many other businesses both large and small, we've chased such manufacturing off our shores and that MFJ is merely the latest victim of an overly demanding governmental policy on business? The trend for a lot of years is for everything to be moved offshore. Are we making running a business here in America, from less than attractive to nigh on impossible?

And for our part, there is a bit of Irony here. It's been something of a Ham radio sport to mock MFJ. "Mighty Fine Junk" etc.  And of course, now we're seeing Hams wailing and wondering what happened, and hoping it can be saved. I'm among the latter, but I'm not holding my breath, given the business pressures, as I've said.

Did we really need to wait until the last one died before we noticed the trend?